Biden DHS Funded Program That Highlighted Video Conflating Conservatives And Nazis In Its Grant Application: Report
A Biden Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “anti-terrorism” program sent funding to an outfit that, in its grant application, included a video conflating conservative and Christian groups with neo-Nazis and terrorists, a new report from the Media Research Center (MRC) suggests. Additionally, in another video from the linked conference, the same researcher from the first video bragged about working to get conservatives fired, evicted, expelled, socially ostracized, and de-banked.
The DHS program is called the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program (TVTP), and has distributed nearly $40 million to various public, private, and nonprofit organizations “to establish or enhance capabilities to prevent targeted violence and terrorism.”
Instead of fighting terrorism, though, the nonprofits appear to have been fighting several law-abiding political opponents of the left. The University of Dayton, for example, was awarded $352,109 to establish its PREVENTS-OH program. In its grant application, the university included footage from a conference in which University of Cincinnati research fellow Michael Loadenthal presented a “Pyramid of Far-Right Radicalization” chart. The chart presents mainstream conservative news outlets and organizations — like The Heritage Foundation, Fox News, the National Rifle Association, PragerU, Turning Point USA, and the Christian Broadcasting Network — as dangerous pipelines to neo-Nazism.
Loadenthal has bragged about his affiliation with Antifa and his Twitter feed, the MRC reports, “is rife with posts celebrating acts of left–wing violence (often against police officers).”
In a different seminar titled “White Nationalism Workshop,” Loadenthal instructed listeners on how to “destabilize” political movements by creating fake social media accounts on free speech platforms such as Telegram, Gab, and Rumble. “A lot of things we’re doing are illegal,” he told the audience. “A lot of it involves breaking the law… and I’ve had many conversations with the FBI about this,” he added.
Loadenthal also explained how, once he and other “anti-fascists” identify right-wing individuals or organizations, they doxx them by “contact[ing] employers, landlords, commanding officers, school officials, family, [and] clergy.” He also explained how so-called anti-fascists can “pressure financial services” like GoFundMe, Patreon, PayPal, and Venmo, “retailers” such as Amazon, and “service providers” like Airbnb and Tinder to “kick people off.”
“Deplatforming,” Loadenthal continued, “is denying far-right, fascist folk, any sort of public sphere access, you know, denying them the ability to speak because the belief is, the argument is, that hate speech is more than speech. … To deny people that, to shut down their websites, to close their meetings, to physically prevent them from assembling in public — this is the belief.”
Loadenthal admitted to instigating “direct confrontation” with people he described as “white supremacists” in his “younger years.” “We organized largely through networks — today people would call Antifa, at the time it was known as anti-racist action — to follow white supremacists where they go, to outnumber them, and then to physically confront them and deny them the space to physically meet in public,” he said. “This is the idea of deplatforming. I worked in that realm for a long time.”
During the same “Extremism, Rhetoric, and Democratic Precarity” seminar in which Loadenthal presented the “far-right radicalization” chart, Rutgers University faculty member Alexander Hinton, whose research specializes in genocide, compared the Trump administration to the Khmer Rouge, a Cambodian regime that killed “an estimated 1.5 million-2 million people from 1975-79.”
At that same seminar, speaker Nicole Widdersheim, deputy Washington director for Human Rights Watch and former senior policy adviser to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Center, “compared Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proposing a volunteer civilian military force to assist the National Guard in emergencies such as hurricanes to the Nazis’ Holocaust during World War II,” reports Fox News Digital.
“We now have evidence that the Biden administration is ratcheting up its anti-American targeting of Christians, conservatives, and Republicans,” concluded MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider. “This is abhorrent and criminal.”
DHS Denials
A DHS representative told Fox News Digital that the grant was unrelated to the conference seminars included in the university’s application. “This seminar was not funded, organized, or hosted by the Department of Homeland Security,” the representative said, claiming the chart “was not part of any successful grant application to the Department of Homeland Security.”
In the grant application, however, the university reportedly described the conference as indicative of its work “to assess regional needs and capacities for violent extremism prevention.”
Moreover, it is not as though the DHS was simply negligent and gave the university the grant without clicking on the link and knowing about the conference. The agency was represented at the conference, with DHS Agent Joseph Masztalics appearing as a featured speaker.
“The University of Dayton Human Rights Center received its PREVENTS-OH grant in the fall of 2022 and, to date, its community awareness events and dialogues have focused on all forms of domestic terrorism, targeted violence, and extremism,” the University said in its own statement to Fox.
Biden Weaponizes the Federal Government
“In August 2020, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden vowed to ‘end the Trump administration’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Program’ and replace it with his own,” reports Fox News Digital. According to Fox, Biden and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas replaced Trump’s anti-terror organization with the new Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, which is now the parent department of the TVTP grant program.
“The creation of CP3 [is among] the latest actions DHS is taking under Secretary Mayorkas’s leadership to comprehensively combat domestic violent extremism, including violent white supremacy,” reads a 2021 DHS press release.
In a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan detailing its findings, the MRC called for an investigation and criminal prosecution. “The Media Research Center has uncovered disturbing documentation that proves that the government is colluding with left-wing activists, academics, and state and local officials in an active effort to target some of the most prestigious conservatives and prominent political, religious, and media groups in the country, linking them directly to Nazis and terrorists,” reads the letter. “The American people need to know that those who are abusing their positions in the federal government will be held accountable for this criminal behavior.”
“We call on federal prosecutors to hold violators accountable under our civil rights laws, 18 USC Section 241 and 18 USC Section 242 accountable,” said Schneider.
Rep. Jordan is chairman of the newly established Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and the MRC findings are among numerous recent examples of government targeting of political opponents that his subcommittee has encountered.
Last week, the explosive Durham report revealed how the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, deep state operatives, and corporate media peddled disinformation to justify surveillance of Donald Trump’s campaign, interfere in the 2016 election, and undermine Trump once he was elected. And last Thursday the subcommittee hosted a hearing, where “whistleblowers accused the FBI of engaging in a complex series of highly corrupt and partisan activities, including the manipulation of statistics, targeting of political opponents, and retaliating against whistleblowers seeking to expose the agency’s corruption,” reports The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood.
“This report only scratches the surface of the Biden DHS’s nefarious TVTP grant program,” states the MRC report. “MRC Free Speech America has obtained more documents from other DHS grantees and other organizations through our concentrated FOIA initiative and will be presenting further evidence of the Biden administration’s efforts to target conservatives, Christians and the Republican Party going forward.”
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
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